Creative Cookery

The Crippled Dick long-player debut for Swiss beat biter Balduin sees percussive vegetables chopped and diced before familiar loungecore ingredients find themselves fed through the sound mincer. Unlike Ninja Tune contemporaries the Herbaliser or Irma's Easy Access Orchestra, Balduin relies on samples as opposed to live instrumentation — describing his sound as "mellonotronix hard disk pop" — and is subsequently able to perform dexterous flips and twists within the rhythm section, underpinning these gymnastics with an easier to grasp barrage of horns, strings, and atmospherics. Though this premise wears a little thin by the close of the 18 tracks on offer, in the main these plentiful flavors work well, the opening "A Flavored Bouquet" setting a sonic agenda that soars far beyond the sum of its constituent parts.